December 13, 2002

SADDAM'S SECRET WEAPON

SADDAM’S SECRET WEAPON

Yale Kramer

It’s not nerve gas, or weaponized germs, or even nukes. Anyone who can remember back to Desert Storm can figure it out. It’s in all the histories of the Gulf War and even if the Iraqis are only a little clever they’ve already formulated a plan to use it.

It’s the American journalist and his love affair with victimhood.

The problem is can we figure out a defense against it.

American journalists, having grown-up and matured professionally during the post Viet Nam and post Watergate years, have ideals, ethical values, and political attitudes that are not the same as yours and mine. They are anti-war, anti-aggression, anti-conservative, anti-industrial, anti-military, ambivalent about free markets, and ambivalently patriotic —some more, some less. They invariably tend to see themselves answering to higher and more universal standards than Homeland and Country. For them The (Liberal) Truth is their God. In practical terms this requires them to be as sympathetic to the enemies of America as to America itself. For them it’s all the same because they still believe what their journalism professor told them—that their true allegiance must be to some abstract ideal—but only if it’s a little left of center.

Two other characteristics derived from those above dominate their loyalties: the first is their over-identification with anyone they perceive as a victim or who claims to be a victim; the second is their tendency to see themselves not as mere reporters of the quotidian facts of life, but as changers of the world—political, ethical, cultural reformers. Thus they see their essential function as derived from the tradition of the “non-conforming critic.” They see their job as being skeptical of government policy whatever it may be.

Saddam Hussein has a powerful and ready-made fifth column within his enemy’s country, who will be working, if not for him, at least against them.

What made the media’s message such a powerful and worrisome factor in Desert Storm was one of the wonders of American culture—its fairmindedness. It is America’s love of fair play that makes American values so unique in the history of civilization. In what other civilization has fair play had such an important role in the regulation of everyday affairs? In what other culture must the hero allow the villain to draw first in a duel? It also makes us seem politically naïve and unsophisticated. Our most popular iconic heros, like Will Kane in “High Noon,” or Jefferson Smith in “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington,” are disillusioned and at first baffled by duplicity or ruthlessness. The average American—the guy who is neither far right nor far left, neither hawk nor dove—has been, is, and probably always will at first be baffled by duplicity and ruthlessness.

There is no way to win a war against duplicitous, ruthless enemies except by being more ruthless and duplicitous. The capacity to be ruthless in people who are not criminal is a rare commodity. At the present time we have no military leaders who have what it takes to be ruthless. We have no George Pattons on the shelf waiting to be mustered into leadership roles. All of our current military leadership suffer from post Viet Nam Syndrome—fear of long-term military commitments, and squeamishness, fear of spilling blood, ours or our enemy’s. Rick Atkinson reports in Crusade, his history of Desert Storm, that General Buster C. Glosson, one of the leaders of the air war in Iraq, “had one overriding passion—which many thought made up for his less endearing traits—to preserve the lives of his pilots. In May 1971, when he began flying F-4s from Da Nang, his squadron had comprised twenty-six airplanes; three months later, when the squadron moved to Thailand, twelve were left. He was determined to avoid incurring such losses again. Shortly before the war [Desert Storm] began, Glosson toured all the wings in his command to stress prudence. ‘The outcome of this war is not in question,’ he told the pilots. ‘The only issue is how many body bags we’re going to send back across the Atlantic. The bottom line is that there’s not a damn thing worth dying for in Iraq. Nothing.’” (see Steve Rittenberg’s post on George S. Patton, Jr.)

Atkinson devotes a whole chapter in Crusade to our military leaders’ handwringing over the tragedy of a bombing error in Baghdad in which a heavily fortified Iraqi bunker that was thought mistakenly to be occupied by Iraqi military was bombed and many civilians using the bunker as a shelter were killed (two hundred according to the Iraqis).

According to Atkinson, Colin Powell, “…attuned to public opinion and the geopolitics underlying any military venture… sensed a growing unease over the incessant pounding of Baghdad.” Baghdad now the victim, the Americans now the bullies. The effort to kill Saddam was something the country could accept, “but killing women and children, however inadvertently, was quite a different matter, particularly when television so vividly displayed the carnage. Another massacre like [this] would destroy the allies’ moral standing, Powell felt, and anyone who doubted that failed to understand war in the age of modern telecommunication.” [Italics mine.]

There is no doubt that fighting a war requires a certain capacity for ruthlessness. And a review of the events suggests that there was barely enough to go around between the military and civilian leaders. It is not surprising, then, that the end of Desert Storm came in such an ambivalent and controversial manner.

Saddam is ruthless—he can murder his political enemies in the blink of an eye, he can poison gas his own people if it suits his purposes, without fearing that his “moral standing” will be diminished, he can order the plundering and ruin of a neighbor country with no loss of sleep—and he is a master of duplicity and conniving. And now that he knows our weakness—our journalists: his fifth column—he would be a fool not to exploit their credulousness and anti-governmental attitude even more than he did in 1991.

He would be a fool not to welcome as many American journalists as he could find. Not to wine them and dine them. Not to feed them all the news he could to show them that poor Iraq is only trying to defend itself and its people, their homes and their families from the powerful war machine of the greatest super-power in history—Iraq the victim of George W. Bush’s bullying policies. Show them devastated houses and apartments, with broken, bloodied cribs and armless teddy bears. Show them bombed out schools with writin’ and ‘rithmetic still on the blackboards. Show them crushed mosques and hospitals without electricity or water, feverish children dying of the unsanitary conditions. You get the idea.

The idea is to pull at the heartstrings of the media people, to make the folks back home begin to have doubts about this war. Where are these weapons of mass destruction that Bush and his gang keep hollerin’ about? Is this fanatical pursuit really worth all this pain and suffering we are inflicting on these poor people, these poor innocent kids? To make even our fighting men feel like shameful bullies, “pickin’ on these poor bastards who can’t even shoot straight; like shootin’ fish in a fuckin’ barrel. Jeez, how long we gonna keep torturin’ these bastards?”

The idea is to give the Democratic Party some talking points, give Europe some talking points, give the Arabs some talking points while the clock ticks closer and closer to the beginning of the next election cycle in November of 2003. Bush has about a year to pull this Iraq thing off, then Saddam just may be able to spoil a military and political triumph for the President, and instead leave him with a hard-to-defend messy compromise.

Is there any counter-attack against this “Victim Defense” strategy?

Yes, only one, and it’s simple and cheap, but it requires the President and his team to tell Americans what Saddam’s secret weapons are—the people’s trusting nature, their sense of fair play, their goodness of heart, their belief in the goodness of others. They must be warned that the enemy will try to use the American media for their own propaganda, and that some journalists will fall for it. This message must be repeated as often as possible. Americans must be warned that when they are fighting a ruthless and unscrupulous enemy it is not immoral or ungodly to harden their sensibilities and to remember that if children are sick and dying in Iraq it is Saddam who is responsible for their suffering and that he could end their pain and unhappiness in the twinkling of an eye.

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